After thinking over the horror comics that I’ve read, I’m forced to agree with him. Even when I enjoyed a horror comic, such as The Walking Dead or some of the earlier Hellblazer comics, I didn’t find them particularly scary.

There’s certainly no way that comics can be scary in the same way that movies are scary. Comics can’t use mysterious noises or creepy music (textual representation of sound is a poor substitute). Also, since movie-goers instinctively understand that the world of the film extends beyond the view of the camera, horror films routinely have their monsters lurk just outside the frame. And they can startle the audience by having the monster (or a fake-scare cat) pop out from outside the camera’s view. In comics, establishing clear spatial relationships from one panel to the next is difficult enough without also having to imply that there’s something lurking off-panel. And the “temporally static” nature of comics makes it impossible to startle readers with anything popping out.

But the greatest advantage that horror movies have over comics has less to due with the technical differences between the media, and more to do with how the average person watches a movie. Over the decades, Hollywood and the theater chains trained audiences to watch movies in a certain way: you turn out the lights, ignore everyone else in the room, and stop thinking. Movie-goers become completely immersed in the narrative, and horror films exploit this immersion like no other genre. As an example, when the soon-to-be victim wanders through a dark hall to investigate a strange sound, the camera forces the viewer to follow the victim and vicariously experience everything they see and hear.

Comics simply can’t offer the same degree of narrative immersion. For starters, reading comics with the lights off is rather difficult. Also, immersion requires a passive mind, and comic readers can never turn their brains completely off. Even the most moronic superhero title still requires some active thought in order to read the text and interpret the narrative flow between panels. None of this is meant to say that comics can’t be engrossing page-turners, but comic readers generally don’t lose track of reality to the same degree that movie-goers do.

So does this mean that comics can never be scary? To the extent that “scary” refers to the visceral, immediate fears that horror movies deliver so effortlessly, the answer is yes. But if “scary” also encompasses the deeply-rooted fears and common anxieties of the readers, then perhaps there is some hope for horror comics.

Novels have many of the same technical limitations as comics, and yet there is a long literary tradition of horror dating back to Frankenstein, and horror writers such as Stephen King continue to enjoy great success. Obviously, a medium consisting entirely of text could never scare readers with startling noises or monsters jumping out of closets. So novelists tend to downplay immediate physical terror and focus on social fears and unnerving concepts, particularly of a religious or existential nature. Frankenstein reflected the major anxieties of the Romantic era, particularly the fear of a godless mankind. H.P. Lovecraft scared his readers by envisioning a universe that was essentially hostile. Most ghost stories exploit the fear of death and the the unknowable nature of the afterlife. There’s no reason why comics couldn’t tap into similar social or religious anxieties (and it’s worth noting that the best horror films already do so).

But horror comics have largely failed to measure up to the standards of horror novels. The earliest horror comics like Tales from the Crypt were designed to offer nothing more than the cheapest and shallowest entertainment. Plus, individual comic issues were simply too short to contain a plot with any complexity. And it was always easier to just add more gore than to write a gripping story. The visual element of comics may have also convinced comic creators that their medium had more in common with film than with literature, leading to futile efforts to re-create the thrills of horror movies on the static page.

Comics have the potential to be scary, but it’s a potential that remains unrealized. There is, however, the possibility that my knowledge of horror comics is too limited, so I’ll pose a question to the commenters: have you ever read a scary comic?

28 Comments

The Alan Moore Swamp Thing vampire comic two-parter freaked me out pretty thoroughly when I was a kid. The comic version of a Steven King anthology movie (Creepshow? was that it?) also got me way back when…and there were some British black and white sci-fi comics when I was quite little (like 7?) that I found disturbing.

It’s hard to imagine a comic really scaring me now — though most movies don’t really scare me either. The last one I can think of that really disturbed me was Dark Water which I saw a couple of years back….

It’s definitely more of a creeped-out/moody kind of thing, but I think Kevin Huizenga (sp?) has done some good, scary stuff. Thinking of the one he did for the first “Orchid” anthology, and also one that is in “Curses” (about some kind of basement demon he has to deal with to be able to have a child with his wife, I think?).

Also, Josh Simmons … partly things like “House,” but also just the fact that you never know with him what sorts of depravities he’s going to show us.

Those early Moore-Bissette-Totleben issues of Swamp Thing worked to horrify mainly by subverting what you expect to read in a comic. Of course, it helped that I was in my mid-teens at the time. Now, I’m not sure that bag of tricks would work today, even if I were a mid-teen, except that those particular comics still get me tense and freak me out. Combination of effective text (similar to the work of a good horror novelist) and really effective imagery. (Or maybe the right word is “disturbing” rather than “horrifying.” Nothing in Swamp Thing made me lose sleep.)

Some of that sensibility got into some of Taboo, but notably not From Hell.

Great post. I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately. I’ve always thought Black Hole, Uzumaki, Drifting Classroom, Pim and Francie, Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron, Swamp Thing and Hideshi Hino’s stories are all good examples of effectively scary horror comics. Same with a few comics that aren’t strictly in the horror genre (the “Seeing Eye Dogs of Mars” section in the last ACME, for instance.)

Are mainstream horror movies even trying to scare their audience anymore? I saw Survival of the Dead last week, and the zombies there were played for laughs more than anything. The movies I’ve seen in the “torture porn” genre seem to want to shock their viewers more than they want to scare them, which feels like a whole different thing to me. Maybe I’m just out of touch with horror movies, though.

Comics can use their “static-ness” to their advantage, I think. I’m jumpy and easily manipulated by music or loud noises in a movie. In Anti Christ, the genital mutilation startled me (or grossed me out or whatever it was supposed to do?) But it didn’t stay with me the way the scene with the stillborn fawn did from earlier in the film. Or this sequence did from Uzumaki:

That weird fuzzy dog thing from Velvet Glove? Images like that linger with me. Maybe the Ito and Maruo pages are bad examples, since there’s an element of “shock” to them too. But when it’s 5 am and I’m having a hard time getting to sleep, I’ll remember stuff like that.

There were two stories I read in Creepy (or maybe Eerie) magazine back in the day that really freaked me out. I wish I remembered what their titles were or who wrote and drew them. Was about a little boy who had drowned and the other was about a woman whose old man neighbor was always on the porch staring at her. I’ve forgotten most of the stories I’ve read in the old Warrens but those have stuck with me.

As a kid, I was once freaked out by a Superman comic. Superman was fighting a pair of bad guys with nuclear-themed powers, at least one of which was referred to as a “mutant”. The evil plot was to create a series of atomic disasters that would either kill off or horribly mutate most everyone on Earth, except for the rare few people who would be transformed into super-mutants and become a new race of gods or something.

At the same time, there was a sub-plot going on where Supergirl revealed to Superman that actually, they were both mutants as well, their parents were atomic scientists, and Krypton never existed, it was all some fantasy Clark Kent made up – punctuated by a scene where Supergirl smashes the bottle city of Kandor that’s revealed to be filled with nothing but models and plastic people.

This was during the Cold War, and for whatever reason, the combination of Superman not being Superman as we knew him along with a threat of nuclear annihilation brought the real-life risk of Armageddon into cold, sharp focus, and I was filled with existential dread for a few weeks, and would get cold chills even years after if I dared to re-read the comic.

Michael DaForge- thanks for those links. One advantage that comics have over movies is that they can easily portray surreal and disturbing imagery (movies can have surreal imagery, but it’s harder to pull off well and much more expensive). Unfortunately, American horror comics tend to have boring mainstream art. I may start looking for some horror manga to read, and Uzumaki seems like a good place to start.

Obviously you haven’t been reading the REALLY scary stuff. One Manga I frequently think of is the one-shot, Look me in the Eyes When You Talk, by Hitoshi Iwaaki. If the name sounds familiar, he’s the same author/artist of Parasyte, also a worthy read. The pages leading up to the ending never fail to give me goosebumps, even when I just THINK about them.

What makes the scaryness even more effective is that, despite the warning of extreme gore, very little blood is actually shown. And when it is, you still feel the effects more than if buckets of Carrie blood were splashed around.

I think the main problem American comics have with horror is that they’re more about the visual pay-off rather than the emotional build-up that the Japanese seem to excel at.

Another Manga that comes to mind that comes close to the American model is Franken Fran. It could be best described as a cross between Black Jack and Tales From the Crypt. Each episode being a singular outlandish medical procedure taken to logical extremes usually ending in awful, awful retribution upon the patient. The scenes are capable of inspiring HellRaiser flicks. It’s only recently been scanlated again after a long hiatus, so it’s worth jumping back into again.

I think Cronenburg and Charles Burns have a lot in common and are both effective at a form of horror generally termed ‘Body-Horror’. Cronenburg’s first feature (“Attack of the Blood Parasites”) actually used the same SPFX technology as “The Exorcist” (which was filmed at the same time). But the scares in Cronenburg’s film where far more visceral, and lack the deep religious unease of ‘The Exorcist’. Instead of religion Cronenburg critiqued modern sexual mores or sexual freedom in modern times. It played on existing feelings towards homosexuals, swingers, and licentiousness in general as something dangerous and bodily disgusting.
Charles Burns’ early comics seem to evoke European comics from the post May ’68 wave of creators, some of which I found rather disturbing as a 13 year old reading translations in “Heavy Metal”. Burns stated in interview that he was interested in an “internalised horror”. It seems to me that he started out in a rather experimental way and graduated closer to Cronenburg’s Body-Horror tropes in “Black-Hole”. This ‘internalised horror’ is brought out by ‘body-horror’ tropes and the ennui of teenage isolation and sexual awakening. It is a very effective form of horror comic in that it allows the audience to locate the horror inside themselves.
As for a lot of the accidental horror that affected many of us as young readers (that came about not from horror comics but reading, say, ‘Superman’) these would have also come to us from other media. In fact a ‘phobic response’ might be better explanation for some of these experiences. Those experiences are very strong though. I think partly because a horror audience is trying to obtain an experience they’ve had before – where as these accidents of horror turn otherwise intended objects or stories into something actually sinister. As though they are signs of a warped and frightening universe. Perhaps this was H.P Lovecraft’s inspiration?

“That sounds amazing. Do you know what issue it was, or who the writer/artist were?”

Not offhand, but I managed to Google it up – What I had were two parts of a three-issue arc, written by Gerry Conway with art by Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez and Frank Springer, Superman issues 307-309.

In 307, the main bad guy was the Protector, a mutant whose powers were “fueled by pollution”, who was protecting – I guess – oil tankers, since Superman had gone on a tear over the Earth’s environmental problems, figuring he’d had one world blow up under him and that was enough. Near the end of this issue is where Supergirl tells him Krypton never existed.

The guy with the plan to nuke the world was “Dr. Radion”, who shows up in 308, and there’s a fight and the bad guys lose, and Superman is full of angst over the Krypton-never-existing business.

309, which I did not have, apparently features some sort of space battle, and the reveal that Supergirl was lying to him about not being Kryptonian, since she was worried about his recent bout of eco-terrorism and figured telling him his whole past was a lie was the best way to get him to leave the oil tankers alone.

I’m not a huge horror comics person either, but Junji Ito’s Uzumaki scared the hell out of me. But what was interesting is that – while there were individually scary moments – the really frightening element of Uzumaki is looking back at the entire story after having read it all. I think what made it so potent was not just the bizarreness of the story (and trust me, it gets crazy), but the gradual way the craziness overtakes everything sane, normal, and comforting within the world of the comic. And the idea that the source of the terror isn’t a person or a monster but a recurring spiral motif is ingenious. It’s possible that you might be immune to its horrifying charm, but it’s also possible that you won’t be able to eat a Ho-Ho for a week after reading it.

My daughter (2 1/2) was first scared by images of the Jack O’ Lantern in Marvel’s Wizard of Oz by Scott Young. Ironically it took multiple viewings of Tim Burton’s film the Nightmare before Christmas to stop her nightmares brought on by a comic. But she is two. Perhaps that is the point. Given you exposure to other mediums it is difficult to be scared by a static image…but our imagination does have time to take off in panel gutters and perhaps we lack the imagination, my daughter has, due to our exposure to interactive media.

CW – it’s funny that you mentioned Superman, when I was a kid the most scared I’ve ever been reading a comic was Superman Family #178. Lois Lane becomes bionic because of some aliens, at first it’s great, she has superhuman abilities and she convinces Superman to marry her, but then her skin starts falling off (it’s actually kind of Charles Burns-ish now that I think about it).

I think you guys are coming up with some great examples – but don’t you guys maybe see a difference between creepy and actual fear?

Not to keep making this a comics vs. film thing, but horror is one of the most demonstrable ways I can think of to show how effecting film can be. People experiencing fear in a film can have physical reactions on an involuntary level, as if their safety is actually being threatened. I just don’t think comics can work that directly – to the point where on some level you are no longer conscious of the fact that what you are experiencing isn’t actually happening to you.

I want to revisit an earlier post about Pim and Francie. I’ve read P&F a couple of times now, and Al Columbia’s book has horrified me every time. The mastery of cartoon language combined with the non-narrative nature of P&F, in conjunction with the disturbing content, builds tension in a way horror movies rarely do.

To address the points of this post, I agree that a cinematic approach to horror comics is doomed to failure. However, this is less a demonstration of comics’ inability to evoke horror than its inability to evoke horror by cinema’s rules, and that comics must create a new way of presenting information in order to be considered scary.

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